What is school life like in Mongolia?

[question from Louisa, Sam, Ed, Danielle, Miles, Anna, John, Victoria, Jake, Tom B, Louisa and Patrick]

Well, I’m not an expert on this subject, but luckily I found someone who was. I asked Ankhzaya, a local schoolgirl, about school life in Mongolia. Ankhzaya had some interesting answers:


1. What subjects do you learn at school?
Mathematics, Mongolian, Reading, Korean language, English language, Nature, Society, Music and Dance, Sports/Gymnastics, Health, Drawing, Technology, and Mongolian traditional script.

2. What do you like about school, and what do you not like?
:) Generally, I like mostly everything about our school, but there are several things that I like most. I like the uniform, because it’s pretty. We have two foreign (Korean) teachers. One of them teaches Korean language and the other teaches English. Both of them are young women and I like them, because they are friendly. Also, we have a cafeteria in the school, which I like to go to during the 15-minute break. Another thing I like in our school is its discipline.

:( But there are a few things that I do not like. We do not have a specific teacher for the Health subject, therefore, our class teacher is teaching Health at the moment. But often, she uses the hour for other subjects. But Health is one of my favourite subjects.
The boys fight with each other in the classroom, and I do not like that.

3. What games do you play with your friends?
We play ball games (throwing and catching small ball against a wall), volleyball, hopscotch, skipping, “run and chase”, and the “wolf and camels” game (one person plays the role of a wolf and tries to catch a baby camel, while the others play the roles of different age camels. All the camels stand in line with the father camel at the front, mother camel stands next in the line, etc, and the baby camel at the end of the line. The camels have to stay in line, holding to each other, and they can not break their connection while trying to save the baby camel from the wolf).

4. How many lessons do you have, and how long are they?
I have 5 - 6 lessons everyday, each for 40 minutes. (Most Mongolian children only have school for half the day – half the children go to school in the morning, and the other half go to school in the afternoon)

5. How long it takes for you to get to school?
As the school is quite far from my home, I go to school by bus, and it takes me about 40 minutes to get to the school.

6. How many days do you go to school and how much holiday do you have?
I go to school 5 days a week, from Monday to Friday.
We have school holidays throughout the year. We have a week’s holiday after the first term (in mid November), two weeks holiday after the second term (in early February) and another one week holiday after the third term (in mid April). Then, we have summer holiday, which lasts for 3 months from early June until the end of August.

We also rest during the national holidays. These are New Year (on 31 December and 1 January), Independence Day (26 October), Mongolian New Year (3 days in February), and International Women’s Day (8 March).


Next week I will ask the same questions to Bud, a local schoolboy.

This edition of Project Mongolia was brought to you with the help of Ankhzaya and her aunt Bulgan. Many thanks goes to them!